2014: The First Quarter in Numbers

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With a quarter of 2014 behind us, it’s time to update you on what’s happened at Kickstarter so far this year. In the past three months alone, 4,497 projects have been successfully funded by 887,848 backers. People have backed everything from a restoration of Abraham Lincoln’s couch to Neil Young’s new music device, Pono.

15 new people joined the Kickstarter team in the first quarter of this year, our biggest period of team growth to date. We welcomed 3 new customer support specialists, and 4 members of our Creator’s team. (Did you know: We have 17 people whose full time job it is to talk to creators about their projects? Hit us up!)

Superbacker

I agree with deborah.. I backed a few bad ones that purposely took money. Kickstarter should start compiling a black list to at least shame some folks and give backers a resource to check against so they dont strike again.

Superbacker

Congratulations on stunning figures. Again. All this, and the incredible community of supporters and creators you've helped to build. It's a very intense job done very well, and I challenge anyone to do it better than you guys. Thanks.

We started our business with nothing but a PC (running Linux, of course) - we used a Hackerspace to prototype our designs, Kickstart*r got us funding and customers, Lasersaur (a Kickstarted project) supplied our equipment, all of our CAD designs, Web site, etc is based around OpenSourced hardware. 100% of what we do is on the Internet. With two successful Kickstarter projects, we made enough in the first year to double the size of our business and buy a new house to put it in! Our business is now my wife's sole income - and I expect to chuck in my day job to help out next year.

Geek culture has finally reached the place it always wanted to be. You can go from nothing to a stable, profitable business in under a year using nothing more than your brain and free 'stuff'.

Kickstarter is an important cog in that machine - so keep up the good work guys!

My question for Yancey Strickler is, why do you censor the Gosnell film project which aims to produce a documentary about the mass murderer in Phili' who abused women for 30 years with aid from authorities ??
I am all behind the group financing of independant thinkers and creative types and have seen some pretty far fetched and questionable projects financed through KS. Are you going to only enable projects which portray one ideological viewpoint or does your inclusiveness exclude certain subjects ?
What are your criteria for who gets to kickstart a project and who doesn't ??

Superbacker

Congrats, guys. I do wish you would do more to protect fraud on both backers and creators - and do more to be involved when projects go bad You pretend you aren't part of the process - but you are, its time to step up and take more responsibility.

The Contact Us link on the website seems to think topics are just related to pressing issues that needs resolving. I don't see any way of sending Kickstarter suggestions aside from plopping them here in some blob comment section...